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Participant
July 4, 2025
Answered

Deleting a spot color -- option to replace all instances with another swatch

  • July 4, 2025
  • 2 replies
  • 181 views

Indesign gives you a dialogue option to replace existing instances of that swatch/spot colour in your artwork when you delete a swatch/spot color.

 

It would be super useful to have the same behaviour in Illustrator ... making it much easier to add a new colour and clean up all instances of unused similar colours.

 

The only cost is having to dismiss the dialogue if you want to simply delete a global/spot swatch that is applied to one or more objects in your artwork, if you want to keep the colour on the object and make those instances no longer global/spot colours (the current only option/default behaviour).

Thanks for your consideration.

Correct answer Ton Frederiks

Click the swatch that you want to keep.

Cmd (Mac) or Ctrl (Win) the color swatch you want to get rid of and be replaced by the first clicked color.

Select Merge Swatches from the Swatches panel menu.

2 replies

Ton Frederiks
Community Expert
Ton FrederiksCommunity ExpertCorrect answer
Community Expert
July 4, 2025

Click the swatch that you want to keep.

Cmd (Mac) or Ctrl (Win) the color swatch you want to get rid of and be replaced by the first clicked color.

Select Merge Swatches from the Swatches panel menu.

Monika Gause
Community Expert
Community Expert
July 4, 2025

Merge colors from the swatch panel's menu doesn't do it?